The present invention relates to Air Traffic Control (ATC) centers and in particular to consoles providing work stations for air traffic controllers.
Due to the very large number of commercial flights to and from large airports, controlling aircraft traffic has become essential to safety. Air traffic controllers must monitor traffic into and out of airports and ensure that aircraft maintain safe separation. The tasks of the air traffic controllers can easily become extremely stressful and it is essential that an environment is provided which facilitates their ability to concentrate on their work and be free from distractions. The work stations provided for the air traffic controllers must therefore provide reliability and maintainability in addition to a suitable environment. Equipment presently in use has aged to point where maintenance is very expensive and often difficult. There is thus a need for replacement ATC consoles providing improved environment, reliability, and maintainability.
Current Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ATC consoles are rigid welded steel consoles designed to position specific equipment around users. The known ATC consoles are built from the floor to the soffit to block light from the rear service aisle because the users like a dark environment required with radar scopes. The radar scopes came in a very large enclosure, originally sized large enough to fit the old radar monitor with tubes, and the enclosures needed to be removable from the back side. As a result, the service aisle behind the known ATC consoles is quite large, for example, six to eight feet deep. The known ATC consoles were also very deep and the equipment was mounted at the front on angled faces for easy operator access, but which makes servicing the equipment very difficult for the technicians on the back side.
Further, known ATC consoles have large swinging doors reaching across, or nearly across, an aisle behind the consoles. When two technicians are working together to remove equipment, the swinging doors present a significant obstacle to movement behind the consoles.
For decades, the known ATC consoles went through minor changes, but in recent years, more significant changes have started to take place as technology gets more advanced. Updating equipment in the current ATC consoles requires covering old equipment holes and cut new holes to fit the new equipment in these rigid steel ATC consoles. As a result, there is no flexibility with respect to where equipment is located, the amount of ATC console space allocated to each piece of equipment, ergonomic adjustments, etc.
The FAA recognized that other customers of console furniture no longer use rigid welded consoles, but rather use slatwall consoles which have equipment mounts which allow the equipment to be attached over a range of locations on the slatwall allowing ergonomic equipment positioning for the operators. The FAA has been working for a long time on a next generation system which will replace much of the existing equipment with smaller, lighter computer driven solutions resolving these issues and providing desired advantages. Such next generation consoles require development to meet the needs of the FAA.